UK - how to move onto the administrative track? Any tips

[907097gjlj]

I wonder whether anyone have any tips for how to successfully move onto the administrative track. Currently an associate prof in the UK and would quite like to move more into the admin side of things but not very clear about how best to go about it. Our dept/school is very large with HoD usually recruited from outside/very prestigious so that route doesnt seem possible. Has anyone successfully made the move and would like to share any tips?

Could you do the opposite and apply to another place? Something like "head of School", "head of Faculty", "head of College" (i.e. where you line-manage several department heads and are not so involved with day-to-day teaching and admin issues). In my field (which isn't that large) you don't see many such jobs, but there's one every now and then, and people have used those to move into more admin positions.

I'm part-way there - not through HoD but central admin. I applied to an advertised sub-decanal position (successful third time round...). But if your Uni doesn't advertise such things (mine only has recently, with Athena SWAN in mind), you can just go ahead and make a meeting with someone like a Dean and say you're interested in eventually reaching a position like theirs and ask how to get there. I did this before advertisements and was told the way was to get involved in cross-University initiatives and committees, and when I asked how to get involved in these, was told the answer was "tell me and we can send things your way". There are tons of random committees and jobs to do in central admin, and they are interested in knowing who wants to take on these jobs as otherwise it is a small group of (usually overloaded) people, like sub-deans... Right now, there is probably a number of initiatives around digital learning and student engagement on at nearly all Universities. If going straight to the top sounds intimidating, take a look at your University structure and see if you can find someone lower down nearer your stage and ask to meet them and ask about how to get into roles like theirs. I'd be totally happy if a random staff member approached me this way! (and keep them in mind when I needed bodies on committees)

Also, you can join mentoring schemes with the expressed interest of moving into admin. And there might be 'deputy' roles available in your department - you could ask your HoD about such things and say you are interested in moving into admin, and what could you do within your department.

It can take a while - it was 5 years and 3 applications later from my first meeting with a Dean until I finally secured a position. Although perhaps you might be faster - some of my sub-dean peers got it first time round.

In all universities where I have worked, there isn't such a thing as academic moving onto an administrative track: you are still expected to be research active, or at least until you climb quite high up the ladder. Many positions wouldn't be accessible unless you were a professor, but you could certainly use some positions as part of your case for professor. There isn't a track in the sense of one post leading to another - most people do a post for 3-5 years and then move back into their departments, rather than onto another post.

A Dean in my university wouldn't get there through a series of admin posts - they would need to have a strong research leadership background, a high scholarly reputation, involvement at senior level in research councils and similar achievements, in addition to experience in management roles.

I agree with murmuration about talking with somebody from a similar type of research area to you who has experience of the kind of admin roles that interest you.